She stopped wriggling for a couple of seconds and her eyes looked at him, great big dark hollows peering out from a white face with teeth that chattered so hard that he was sure that they just had to fall out.
Right, he thought, take control. Be quick, but not slapdash. Firm, but not rough. Menna looked so traumatised that he felt that she would disintegrate into hysteria at any moment and that would be no good to anyone.
“OK, push yourself up as far as you can and then I’ll grab around your waist and lever you out, understood?” Menna nodded and Iestyn could see from the concentration on her face that she was searching for a foothold. “Try the steering wheel, or the gear stick?”
She obviously found something and pushed herself upwards, and Iestyn rejoiced for her slightness as her chest, now enclosed in a filthy, saturated red and orange dress, wriggled free.
“Lean over my shoulder,” he ordered and he grabbed around her waist and desperately tried to drag her up through the roof. He could feel her efforts as she wriggled this way and that, desperate to get her hips through the gap. Eventually they did and she popped out like a cork from a bottle and Iestyn fell backwards onto the bonnet, pulling Menna back on top of him. They slid down the bonnet with screams and cries of fright. Miraculously, they ended up in a pile at the bottom, still on the bonnet, just, but entangled in branches and ropes of ivy.
“Now, get on that tree trunk. Ready? Go!” Iestyn grabbed around Menna’s thighs and bumped her up onto the tree, pushing her backside until she was safe. He could feel the truck was moving more now, as if it were being lifted by the weight of the water and he knew that they didn’t have much time.
“Go!” he shouted, “that way,” and he pointed her to the opposite bank from where his truck was, no point in going back to that; her bungalow was only a few hundred yards away now.
He watched as Menna started to crawl along, hanging onto branches and clawing at the ivy, whimpering as she went. “Keep going!” he shouted, knowing that if she stopped, they would be done for; the tree just wasn’t wide enough for him to help her along it.
As soon as she had gone far enough to give him room, he clambered up behind her, his final bounce from the bonnet being enough to dislodge it from its position and the back swirled round, crashing into the tree. Menna screamed again as it rocked the tree and Iestyn could see the water damming up behind the truck, which was now wedged sideways against the branches. “Quick! Quick!” he yelled, glad that Menna was as strong as she was and he scrambled along behind her, both of them crawling, grabbing for branches, slipping and sliding on the ivy and praying that it was strong enough to withstand their tugging.
Finally they reached the point whereby the tree was over land and Menna ground to a halt. Iestyn was able to climb around her and jump to the ground. He put his hands out to her and, like a child, she half-rolled into his arms and he lowered her to the ground, an exhausted wet pile in the soggy grass.
“Come on, Menna,” he shouted, “we have to keep going. Now. Come on!” Menna was sitting on the ground, her teeth chattering, her whole body shivering uncontrollably. He knew that she would be in shock as well as freezing from the water in the truck; she must have been waist-deep in it for a good ten minutes.
“Come on, take that off – off, now,” he cried, and fumbled for the zip on her dress. She wearily submitted and his freezing fingers struggled until it was down. He pulled her to her feet and holding her under the arms with one hand, pulled and tugged and yanked the dress off with the other – not greatly unlike he had done to Judy outside the Young Farmers’ dance that night long ago. The thick brocade material was sodden and she’d be frozen by the time he got her home. Trying not to notice that she was now sat in a puddle of mud on a freezing February night in only a pair of knickers, he ripped off his own clothes. He quickly put his T-shirt on her and then fumbled with his rucked up shirt, which was incredibly difficult given his freezing fingers. He gave up on the buttons and just wrapped the ends further round her. His bloody nonsense fashion jacket was slung over the top and stuffed under her arms to stop the ends from flapping.
Menna managed to smile and mutter a thank you. Although the clothes were caked in mud, they were dry – well, dryish, anyway – and the residual warmth from his body had to be better for her than a sodden, strapless dress.
“Right,” he said, the wind now biting into his naked torso, “come on, we’re off,” and he manhandled her to a half-standing position and then humped her into his arms. Iestyn fought his way out of the rest of the tree branches, getting poked and prodded as he slid around in the mud and he half-carried, half-dragged Menna up the slope.
His relief when he reached the old shingle track was immense and he felt like weeping as he carried his love, her arms wrapped around his neck and her face nestled into his naked shoulder, over the stones.
“Iestyn,” she whispered, “you came for me!”
“Of course I did; I love you,” he mumbled, and he felt her squeeze him tighter around the neck, “and anyway, it’s what I do: I trim hooves, I look after sheep and I rescue maidens…”
As he stumbled off into the darkness, his bare feet were knocked and stubbed by the builder’s rubble that had been dumped on the track over the years where it had become too muddy, but he was oblivious to the pain, partly because of the cold making his feet numb and partly because of the elation he felt at the crescendo of his adventures. He wasn’t quite dressed in a white officer’s suit, but he had done something far better than rescue his lady love from life on the production line.
He saw the roof of her bungalow silhouetted against the moon in the distance. They’d nearly made it! They were going to make it! After all those years of thinking about this point (albeit in a slightly different context) all that trauma and freezing cold water, it was going to be OK! As he bent his head and shed a few tears into Menna’s sodden hair, she clutched her shivering arms around him just a little bit tighter…
Iestyn had been confident that the bungalow would be unlocked, and it was. The only problem now, he thought, would be that, knowing Menna, the fire would be out, there’d be no milk in the fridge and he’d have to wrap her in an itchy old blanket that she’d nailed up across the window to keep the draughts out. Perhaps they’d be better to go on the extra half mile to the farmhouse where at least there’d be some creature comforts?
As he stood in the porch and deliberated, Menna twisted in his arms and found the light switch. Iestyn gasped as the hallway was lit up: surely they were in the wrong house? He shut the door behind them to keep the wonderful warmth in. The deep red rug felt beautifully soft beneath his battered and frozen feet.
Three hours later, Iestyn finally felt that he could risk some sleep. He was the most comfortable he’d ever been in his life and he felt as if he’d really earned some shut-eye. The fire in Menna’s lounge was pumping out heat as he’d stacked it full of logs and opened the vents until it had roared. He’d plonked Menna onto the sofa and then dragged it over closer to the fire. He’d wrapped her in the fur throw and fetched her duvet and quilt from her bedroom and any other blankets he could find, but she was still shivering in a way that shook her whole body.
“Menna, I need to get those things off you and get you warm, OK? Are you happy for me to do that?” She nodded and mumbled that she needed a shower to get warm. He ran off and stopped only for a second with an open mouth to stare at the exotic opulence of her bathroom. He put the shower on to run warm and noted the wonderfully soft towels to wrap her in afterwards. He helped her to her feet and they walked, her leaning against him, into the bathroom.
They stood and looked at the shower. “I’ll leave you to it then,” he said.
“OK,” she replied, trying to hold onto the towel rail. Her legs, bleeding from the crawl across the tree trunk, buckled and he just managed to catch her before she hit the deck. Menna managed a giggle. “Just help me in. I don’t mind you being here – after what you’ve done, I think I can trust you!”
She put an arm up to wipe the water from her face, but slipped and landed painfully on the floor. Oh God, thought Iestyn, she’s never going to manage on her own. He looked around as if hoping to see a lady from a Moroccan hammam standing in the corner ready to step in, but there was no one but him.
Menna tried to stand up, but slipped again, this time bringing all the bottles of shower gel and shampoo clattering down around her.
Iestyn took a deep breath, “Menna, I’ll come in too, OK?”
“OK,” she said feebly as she struggled to pull herself up. He really wasn’t sure about this, but quickly undid the jeans that were now cold and stiff from the mud and pulled them over his feet. Suddenly his feet hurt. He hadn’t realised, but there was blood on the wet floor trickling from the cuts on his feet that had been made as he walked back carrying Menna.
He opened the door of the cubicle, feeling more than a little uncomfortable in just his boxers (although he had time to quickly thank Sima in his mind for slinging them at him earlier that evening, as otherwise, he’d be standing there with a pair of washed out turquoise Y-fronts hanging halfway down his backside through lack of elastane) and he helped Menna to her feet.
Eventually he’d stood in the corner and she leaned back against him, finally relaxing as the warm water poured over them both. He helped her wash her hair with a beautiful citrus shampoo and groaned inwardly as he saw the suds run down over her freckly shoulders.
After far too short a time, he helped her out, quickly removed her panties and wrapped her in three towels and sat her in the chair in the corner of the bathroom. He jumped back into the shower and saw to his feet, soaping the grit and the gravel out of the cuts as gently as he could, then gave himself a quick once-over with the shampoo. He wrapped a towel quickly around his waist, turned the water off and then turned his attention back to Menna.
He helped her back to the sofa, spread her duvet out over the seat and the back and snuggled her into it. He fetched another duvet and wrapped it over her and made sure she was completely covered from head to toe. He made two cups of tea each for them and loaded hers with sugar, ignoring her protests that she didn’t like sugar in her drinks. Then he phoned both Joe’s mobile and his parents’ house and left messages to let them know that everything was all right and that he’d tell them about the Jeep tomorrow. After getting Menna’s agreement, he also left a message at her parents’ farmhouse.
Then he came and perched on the end of the sofa, still wrapped in his own towel. He felt drained, emotionally and physically, and his feet were hurting. The soles felt as if someone had rubbed a cheese-grater over them and he was sure that he’d broken at least one of his toes.
He looked over at Menna, wrapped like a caterpillar in her down-filled chrysalis. “How you feeling?” he asked softly. “Warm yet?”
“Nearly,” she smiled.
“Actually, you’ve still got your towel round you; it’ll be wet. Go on, take it off, I’ll go and get you some pyjamas or something.”
“Iestyn…”
“Yes?”
“Come here. Come and sit behind me. Sit in the corner by here, yeah?”
“Well…OK.” He wasn’t quite sure what she meant and thought it might be perhaps too soon to shout Yippee! toss his towel in the air and pounce on her. Instead, he shuffled into the corner where she patted the sofa and leaned into the duvet. It felt slightly damp, but still warm and scented with the wonderful fragrance of that shampoo that he’d rubbed so happily into her hair.
“Now, put your feet up, twizzle around a bit. Come on, Iestyn!” He did what he was bidden. When he was settled to her liking, she picked up the second duvet again, dropped her towels to the floor and nestled onto his lap, so that she was leaning sideways against him, but still could see his face.
Iestyn’s eyebrows shot up high as the duvet was draped across them both. “Come on,” she said, tugging at his towel, “play the game!” He gulped, then squirmed until his towel was also free and tossed down the back of the sofa.
He pulled her close to him and kissed the top of her hair. Everything was wonderful. He didn’t feel sexual – he was too physically and emotionally exhausted for that – he just felt soft, warm, knackered, in pain, but simply completely overwhelmed with the feelings of love for the woman who was snuggled into his nakedness.
“How did you know to come after me?” she whispered.
“I heard what had happened – and you nearly ran me off the road and I wanted to get your insurance details in case I’d scuffed Joe’s mudguards – no, I wanted…I just wanted to check that you were all right.”
“Am now. Oh, but it was hideous. Actually, the whole night was bloody hideous! Paul, the money, your date – all of it!”
“My date was pretty hideous, to be honest,” he grinned. Menna wriggled around a bit and found one of his hands and she held it in both of hers, working her way around it, stroking his rough patches, the nail he’d crushed on the tow hitch and a tiny soft area on the knuckle of his little finger.
“I sat for ages by the river, debating whether to try and cross it or not,” Menna said, “I knew that it would be deep, but eventually I thought sod it and gave it a go!”
“Why didn’t you use the road bridge?”
“Dunno. Adventure I s’pose. It’d been such a shit night, to crawl home and just go to bed would have been the ultimate in crap endings. I felt like I needed a little something to take my mind off it all being so shit!”
“What, like floating down a river in a four-by-four?”
“Don’t joke; it was horrible. There was a big rock in the middle of the ford that I couldn’t get over – must have been washed down with the flood – so I went round it, but I must have gone too far round as suddenly I was moving and there was absolutely nothing I could do! The whole truck just bobbed away down the stream as if it were a can of pop. I thought it would roll, but it swung round then crunched into that tree.”
Iestyn could feel her beginning to shake and her voice trembled into tears, “And then, and then it started to fill up and I couldn’t open the doors, nor the window and that bloody sunroof, well, well I couldn’t open that either…” Iestyn pulled her tighter to him and cradled her still-damp hair. “…and just when I thought I was going to die in there – you turned up!” She smiled a watery smile at him and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you!”
“You’re welcome, and, as I said, it’s what I do!” Iestyn looked at the clock. Two-thirty a.m. “Come on,” he said, “go to sleep now, tell me about it again in the morning. Are you warm enough?” Menna nodded. “Comfortable enough?” She snuggled down and put her head on his shoulder and nodded again. “Good.”
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tight to his chest, so enjoying the touch of her warm skin against his own. He felt her fall asleep almost immediately and he just lay there, listening to her breathing, stroking her hair, occasionally brushing his lips back and fore across the top of her head and just inhaling the whole idea of lying, naked, on a sofa in front of the fire with his love in his arms. Finally, the happiest man in Wales fell fast asleep.
CHAPTER 33
Naw chwyth cath – the nine breaths of a cat
It was a big crowd that stood at the riverside and surveyed the scene the next morning.
“Fuckin’ hell.”
“Jee-sus.”
“Oh my goodness.”
“Dieu, dieu, Menna bach, dieu, dieu.”
It was drizzling lightly as they stood in a huddle, sinking slowly into the mud. Iestyn was dressed rather absurdly in one of Menna’s pairs of tracksuit bottoms, baggy and long on her, but like a pair of ballet tights on him. He had a tight red rugby shirt that just about reached the top of his ballet tights and
a pair of her dad’s split Wellingtons that she’d found in the bottom of a cardboard box filled with spiders in the garage. However, he stood surveying the scene very seriously with his arm tightly around Menna’s shoulders.
Sima and Joe had opted for designer countryside and Isla wore what she always wore, but with an extra hat on. Tansy was sitting perched on a rock on top of Johnny’s coat feeding Gwennie who was wrapped in so many blankets that she looked like a bundle, rather than a baby. Johnny sat next to her, occasionally pulling the blankets back to make sure that Gwennie could breath.
“Bloody hell, Menna,” said Joe quietly, holding on tightly to Sima’s hand, “how on earth did you manage to get out of that?”
They were all staring at the tree, still lodged in the same place it had been the night before, but now it had something wedged upstream of it that made the water swirl in an unusual way. All that was visible of the truck was one of the back corners, with about eight inches of rear bumper poking out of the muddy water.
Sima exclaimed and then ran to pick up what remained of Menna’s dress, now a filthy piece of material trampled into the mud. “Oh, Menna, you poor thing! You are just so brave – both of you, so brave.” She had tears running down her cheeks as she stood on the other side of Menna and gave her a hug. “Tell me again…”
Menna pointed again to the ford that was now completely unrecognisable, as the track either side just ran into a torrent. She explained quite simply what had happened, making it all seem rather matter-of-fact. Iestyn then filled in his part of the tale. The two sets of parents stood and listened, nodding or whistling whilst Sima provided the dramatics (which was good, as someone should have): groaning and clutching or uttering oh my God every now and then.
“Look!” she cried, as Iestyn got to the bit about how he ran along the bank and fell in the mud. “There’s one of your shoes!” and she pointed to the opposite side of the bank.
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